Exploring Alt-Alphabetic Texts and Creative-Critical Scholarship

vox-populi

In this episode, Ames and Trauman discuss their reading of Nox, by Anne Carson. They focus on the ways Carson addresses the larger topics of translation, history, muteness and shame, while highlighting the connections between her work and their own projects. In the second segment, Ames presents yet another vox pop piece. This one includes well over 100 voices, those of students currently in her first year experience course, Death and Desire in Chicago.

Music Credits: “ditto, ditto!” by DoKashiteru; “Hiroshima” by Bluemillenium.

In our first segment, “Vox Fabri, Vox Dea,” Ames remixes the responses of 45 participants of the Tenth Biennial Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference. Organized around patterns of answers to two questions–“What’s your favorite FemRhet moment?” and “What’s you’re way of making? This vox populi piece makes clear the magic and magnificence of this conference, one celebrating twenty years.

Our second segment recounts a local “microcasting” experiment produced at Columbia College Chicago’s Parents Weekend. Ames and Trauman organized a participatory “making” session in which students and parents recorded different portions of a common audio text, which were then immediately combined into a short podcast for the participants to listen to and to take with them. Although the session didn’t run perfectly, it was a fascinating (and largely successful) experiment engaging an audience as co-producers of a real-time microcasting.